A few weeks ago, at Temple Beth El in Charlotte, ordained PCUSA minister Rebecca Todd Peters stood in the pulpit wearing a Planned Parenthood stole and offered what may be one of the most grotesque reinterpretations of Scripture you’ll hear this year.
Reflecting on Psalm 139—where David marvels that God “knit me together in my mother’s womb”—Peters recounted a conversation with a woman named Emma, who was apparently tired of hearing Christians quote the passage.
Emma’s response?
“I knit and I undo my knitting all the time. Knitting projects aren’t very solid. That’s the beauty and the gift of being the artist. You can make the choice.”
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Think about what is being said here. David uses the imagery of knitting to describe the intentional, personal, creative work of God in forming a human life. Peters takes that same imagery and applauds a comparison between unraveling a sweater and ending the life of an unborn child.
Then, astonishingly, she praises this as theological insight, declaring, “Emma reminded me of what it means to be a theologian.”
No, she didn’t.
A theologian submits to the text. A theologian seeks to understand what God has said. A theologian does not take one of the most beloved passages in Scripture about God’s intimate involvement in creating human life and turn it into a metaphor for abortion. That’s not theology, that’s narcissism in a Planned Parenthood stole. It’s reading a conclusion into the text that the text itself would never support.
And perhaps that’s the most revealing part of all. Peters concludes by celebrating the idea that there are “always new ways to think about scripture.” There certainly are. The question is whether those new ways come from the text itself, or from a culture of killing that demands Scripture be bent, twisted, and unraveled (no pun intended) until it finally says whatever they wanted it to say in the first place.






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